When her three-year-olds help a classmate, recite the alphabet or balance on a bar at the playground, Eugenia Patterson and her assistant at Wilcox Academy in Mid-City, like most good teachers, offer praise, feedback and guidance. But now there's an added step: They also pull out their phone or tablet computer and document the event, with a photograph and notes.

It's part of a new effort by Louisiana to assess how well pre-schoolers are developing, and eventually to hold early childhood education centers accountable, much in the way that public elementary and secondary schools are evaluated and given letter grades. This is the first year of Louisiana's pilot program, which covers publicly funded pre-schools in 15 public school systems- including Orleans and St. Tammany - but state officials plan to expand it to all school systems by 2015.

"Before, the developmental milestones were very general, like a two-year-old can do this or that, but this tool lets you see their progress," Jodie Evans, lead Early HeadStart teacher at Clara's Little Lambs in Algiers said. "With early childhood, a lot of parents have the preconception that we're just babysitters, but this will help us show we're actually teaching these children."

Many preschools already "grade" students in their own way and report student progress to parents. But for this pilot program, Louisiana is using an assessment called Teaching Strategies Gold to unify publicly funded preschools with a single set of standards. It requires that teachers monitor each child's developmental progress and document examples of a child demonstrating certain skills that are needed by the time compulsory education begins in kindergarten.

Though the program will not test children by having them sit down and answer multiple-choice questions, it does set standards for what a child should achieve by a certain age. By the time they are 4, for example, Teaching Strategies Gold assumes that a child "demonstrates positive approaches to learning" and "uses language to express thoughts and needs." (See the list of skills.)

The teachers must ensure all students are meeting "checkpoints" throughout the year, to gauge their progress. In the first three months of the pilot program, however, that has caused some stress at participating early childhood centers. It's new, and the schedule sometimes required evaluating students on skills that had not yet been taught.

"We have 39 days before our first checkpoint, 64 objectives that needed to be met. ... That means 32 observations a day," Rochelle Wilcox, director of the Wilcox Academy, told state Education Superintendent John White at a forum in October. "They're not being effective teachers if they're worrying about that."

Some parents share that concern. "It seems very time-consuming: You have to input data and simultaneously be teaching," said Cree Cayou, parent of a four-year-old at Wilcox. "If the teacher is inputting information, I don't want it to be so overwhelming that it takes away time with my child."

Still, some teachers say they find the tool helps more than hurts their instruction. While teachers at Wilcox and Clara's Little Lambs admitted that meeting the first checkpoint detracted from their ability to lead their classes, overall they welcomed it.

"It's what we always should have been doing in the first place," said Shelly Collen, another Wilcox Academy teacher. "Because you can't sit and test these kids, so this is what we do every day. Now, we just have to prove it to the state."

Jodie Evans of Clara's Little LambsJodie Evans, mother of a two-year-old and lead Early Head Start teacher at Clara's Little Lambs in Algiers talks about Teaching Strategies Gold on Tuesday, November 12, 2013.

It will be a few years before Louisiana begins giving letter grades to pre-school centers. The plan is to base those grades on the results of Teaching Strategies Gold and a separate assessment called Classroom Assessment Scoring System, or CLASS, which assesses the relationship that teachers build with their students. CLASS will start in the middle of the current academic year and will be more an assessment of teachers than of the students.

For now, teachers say they are casually showing parents evidence of a child's progress in parent-teacher conferences. Eventually though, parents are to be given access to the entire database of photos, videos and notes on their children.

When a teacher such as Patterson or Collen implements the assessment tool, they must first find an instance of a child demonstrating one of the listed skills, document it, make notes then check off which skills, and at what level, a child is demonstrating. Some teachers say they find it time-consuming, and some spend hours after class entering the data.

Wilcox said she sometimes receives electronic notifications that her teachers have uploaded data late at night. "They end up doing as much as they can here, and then they make up the rest at home," Wilcox said.

Though documenting a child's behavior is not new to teachers at Wilcox Academy - in the past, they created portfolios with photos and notes to show to parents - Teaching Strategies Gold requires documentation more frequently.

At Clara's Little Lambs, teachers said they've never before had to document things in this way. "It's a challenge. Sometimes you'll be working with the kids and you don't want to pull away and take a photo," teacher Julie Manshel said. "I'll usually write it down on a sticky note and input the data later."

Wilcox said she worries that once the pilot expands to include all publicly funded preschool centers, some won't be able to afford the cost of technology to implement the assessment. Less organized centers, she said, might have trouble acclimating teachers to using it.

"How long is implementation going to take? How long is it going to take you to get to where you need to be and where you can engage the children and meet these standards at the same time?" she asked.

Thus far, the state has spent about $3.5 million on the pilot program, with about $2.6 million being given in direct grants to the 15 participating school systems. The participating systems are responsible for allocating the money to individual pre-schools, mostly for teacher training and technology purchases. However, it is unclear whether the state will continue to provide as much financial support once all publicly funded early childhood centers are participating.

White has acknowledged that implementation of the assessment tool is difficult. That's why the program is still in its pilot phase: To make adjustments and improve it before it expands throughout the state. He stressed that the state's transition to full implementation will be very gradual.

"While we understand probably not every center today is as ready for this level of work as they need to be, we have a plan to help those over time," White said. Long-term grants to local preschool organizers, such as Agenda for Children, are possible to help pay for technology and training costs. "These are exactly the reasons that we did a pilot in the first place rather than going with statewide implementation."

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NOTE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the state's direct grants to participating school systems as totalling $1.2 million.